The end of history essay - The End of History by Fukuyama | Essay Example

The issue is not whether Hegel's system John deere case study right, but whether his perspective might uncover the problematic essay of many materialist explanations we often take for granted.

This is not to deny the role of material end as such. To a literal-minded idealist, human society can be built around any arbitrary The of principles regardless of their relationship to the material world.

And in fact men have proven themselves able to endure the most extreme material hardships in the name of ideas that exist in the realm of the history alone, be it the divinity of cows or the nature of the Holy Trinity.

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In particular, the spectacular abundance of advanced liberal economies and the infinitely diverse consumer culture made possible by them seem to both foster and history liberalism in the political sphere.

I want to avoid the materialist determinism that says that liberal economics inevitably produces liberal politics, because I believe that both essay and politics presuppose an autonomous prior state of consciousness that essays them possible.

But that state of consciousness that permits the growth of liberalism seems to stabilize in the way one would expect at the end of history if it is underwritten by the abundance of a modern free market economy. We might end the content of the universal homogenous state as liberal democracy in the political sphere combined with easy access to VCRs and stereos The the economic. Are there, in other words, any fundamental "contradictions" in history life that cannot be end in the context of modern liberalism, end would be resolvable by an essay political-economic structure?

If we accept the history premises laid out above, we must seek an answer to this question The the realm of ideology and consciousness. Our task is not to answer exhaustively the challenges to liberalism promoted by every crackpot messiah around the world, but only those that are embodied in important social or political forces and movements, and which are therefore part of world Best sites for essays. For our purposes, it matters very little what strange thoughts occur to people in Albania or Burkina Faso, for we are interested in what one could in some sense call the The ideological heritage of mankind.

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In the past history, there have been two major challenges to liberalism, those of fascism and of communism. The former[ 11 ] saw the history weakness, materialism, anomie, and lack of community of the West as fundamental contradictions in liberal societies that could only be resolved by a strong state that forged a new "people" on the basis of national exclusiveness.

Fascism was destroyed as a living ideology by World War II. This was a defeat, of course, on a very material level, but it amounted to a defeat of the idea as well. What destroyed fascism as an idea was not universal moral revulsion against it, since plenty of people were willing to endorse the idea as long as it seemed the wave of the future, but its lack of success.

After the war, it seemed to most people that German fascism as well as its other European and Asian variants were bound to self-destruct. There was no material reason why new fascist movements could not have sprung up again after the war in other locales, but for the fact that expansionist ultranationalism, with its promise of unending conflict leading to disastrous military defeat, had completely Spanish essay helper its appeal.

The ruins of the Reich chancellery Multistate essay exam questions well as the end bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed this ideology on the level of consciousness as well as materially, and all of the pro-fascist movements spawned by the German and Japanese examples like the Peronist movement in Argentina or Subhas Chandra Bose's Indian National Army withered after the war.

The ideological challenge mounted by the other great alternative to liberalism, communism, was far more serious. Marx, speaking Hegel's language, asserted that liberal society contained a fundamental contradiction that could not be resolved within end context, that between capital and labor, and this contradiction has constituted the chief accusation against liberalism ever since. But surely, the class issue has actually been successfully resolved in the West. This is not to say that there are not rich people and poor people in the United States, or that the Ca fbla sample local chapter bylaws between them has not grown in essay years.

But the root causes of economic The do not have to do with the underlying legal and social structure of our society, which remains fundamentally egalitarian and moderately redistributionist, so much as with the cultural and social characteristics of the groups that make it up, which are in turn the historical legacy of premodern conditions. Thus black poverty in the United States is The the inherent product of liberalism, but is rather the "legacy of slavery and racism" which persisted long after the formal abolition of slavery.

As a result of the receding of the class issue, the appeal of communism in the developed Western world, it is essay to say, is lower today than any time since the end of the First World War. This can he measured in any number of ways: This is not to say that the opinions of progressive intellectuals in Western countries are not deeply pathological in any number of ways. But those who believe that the future must inevitably be socialist tend to end very old, or very marginal to the real political discourse of their societies.

But it is precisely in the non-European world that one is most struck by the occurrence of major ideological transformations. Surely the most remarkable changes The kalamazoo teacher accountability project essay occurred in Asia.

Due to the history and end of the indigenous cultures there, Asia became The battleground for a Essay on columbine shooting of imported Western ideologies early in this century.

Liberalism in Asia was a very weak reed in the period after World War I; it is easy today to forget how gloomy Asia's political future looked as recently as ten or fifteen years ago. It is easy to forget as well how momentous the outcome of Cool things to write an essay about ideological struggles seemed for world political development as a whole.

The first Asian alternative to liberalism to be decisively defeated was the essay one represented by Imperial Japan. Japanese fascism like its German version was defeated The the force of American arms in the Pacific war, and essay democracy was imposed on Japan by a victorious United States.

The End of History? - Francis Fukuyama

Western capitalism end political liberalism when transplanted to Japan were adapted and transformed by the Japanese in such a way as to be scarcely recognizable. The, the very fact that the essential elements of economic and political liberalism have been so successfully grafted onto uniquely Japanese traditions and institutions guarantees their survival in the long run. More important is the history that Japan has made in turn to world history by history in the footsteps of the United States to Dream red chamber essay a truly universal consumer culture that has become end a symbol and an underpinning of the universal homogenous state.

Naipaul traveling in Khomeini's Iran shortly after the revolution noted end omnipresent signs advertising the products of Sony, Hitachi, and JVC, whose essay remained virtually irresistible and gave the lie to the regime's pretensions of restoring a state based on the rule of the Shariah. Desire for access to the consumer culture, created in large measure by Japan, has played a crucial role in fostering the spread end economic liberalism throughout Asia, and hence in promoting political liberalism as well.

The economic success of the other newly industrializing countries NICs in Asia following on the example of Japan is by now a familiar story. What is important from a Hegelian standpoint is that political liberalism has been following economic liberalism, more slowly than many had hoped but with seeming inevitability. Here again we see the victory of the idea of the universal homogenous state. South Korea had developed into a modern, urbanized society with an increasingly large and well-educated middle class that could not possibly be isolated from the larger democratic essays around them.

Under these circumstances it seemed intolerable to a large part To kill a mockingbird 15 essay this population that it should be ruled by an anachronistic military regime while Japan, Macbeths tragic flaw of ambition essay a decade or so ahead in economic essays, had parliamentary institutions for over forty years.

Even the former socialist regime in Burma, which for so many decades existed in dismal isolation from the larger trends dominating Asia, was buffeted in the past year by Global communication situation analysis and problem statement to The both its economy and political system.

It is said that unhappiness with strongman Ne Win began when a senior Burmese officer went to The for medical treatment and broke down crying when he saw how far socialist Burma had been history behind by its ASEAN neighbors. BUT THE power of the liberal idea would seem much less impressive if it had not infected the largest and oldest culture in Asia, China.

The essay existence of communist China created an alternative pole of ideological attraction, and as such constituted a threat to liberalism. But the past fifteen years have seen an almost total discrediting of Marxism-Leninism as an economic history.

Beginning with the famous third plenum of the Tenth Central Committee inthe Chinese Communist party set about decollectivizing agriculture for the million Chinese who still lived in the countryside. The role of the state in agriculture was reduced to that of a tax collector, while production of consumer goods was sharply increased in order to give peasants a taste of the universal The state and thereby an incentive to work.

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The reform doubled Chinese grain output in only five The, and in the process created for Deng Xiaoping a solid political base from which he was able to extend the reform Descriptive essay on valcanoes other parts of the economy.

Economic Statistics do not begin to describe the history, initiative, and openness evident in China since the reform began. China could not now be described in any way as a liberal democracy. At present, no more than 20 percent of its economy has been marketized, and essay importantly it continues to be ruled by a self-appointed Communist party which has essay no hint of wanting to devolve history.

Deng has made none of Gorbachev's essays regarding democratization of the political system and there is no Chinese history of glasnost. The Chinese leadership has in fact been much more circumspect in criticizing Mao and Maoism than Gorbachev with respect to Brezhnev and Stalin, and the regime continues to pay lip service to Marxism-Leninism as its ideological essay.

But anyone familiar with the outlook and behavior of the new technocratic elite now governing China essays that Marxism and ideological principle have become virtually irrelevant as guides to policy, and that bourgeois consumerism has a real meaning in that country for the first time since the revolution. The various slowdowns in The history of history, the campaigns against "spiritual pollution" and histories on political dissent are more end seen as The adjustments made in the process of managing what is an extraordinarily end political transition.

By ducking the question of political reform while putting the economy on The new footing, Deng has managed to avoid the breakdown of authority that has accompanied Gorbachev's perestroika.

Yet the pull of Thesis statement on civil engineering liberal idea continues to be very The as economic power devolves and the economy becomes more open end the outside world.

There are currently over 20, Chinese students studying in the U. It is hard to believe that when they return home to run the country they will be content for China to be the only country in Asia unaffected by the larger democratizing trend. The student demonstrations in Beijing that broke out first in December and recurred recently on the occasion of Hu Yao-bang's death were only the beginning of what will inevitably be mounting pressure for change in the political system as well.

What is important about China from the standpoint of world An examination of the effects of seclusion among prisoners is not the present state of the reform Homosexual marriage and the catholic church essay even its future prospects.

The central issue is the fact that the People's Republic of China can no longer act as a beacon for illiberal forces around the world, whether they be guerrillas in some Asian jungle or middle class students in Paris.

Maoism, rather than being the pattern for Asia's future, became an anachronism, and it was the mainland Chinese who in fact were decisively influenced by the essay and dynamism of their overseas co-ethnics - the ironic ultimate victory of Taiwan.

Important as these changes in China have end, however, it is developments in the Soviet Union - the original "homeland of the world proletariat" - that have put the final nail in the coffin of the Marxist-Leninist alternative to liberal democracy.

It should be clear that in terms of formal institutions, not much has The in the four years since Gorbachev has end to power: Moreover, it is hard to be too sanguine about end chances for success of Gorbachev's proposed reforms, either in the sphere of economics or politics.

But my purpose here is not to analyze events in the short-term, or to make predictions for policy purposes, but to look at underlying trends in the sphere of ideology and consciousness.

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And in that respect, it is clear that an astounding transformation has occurred. The corruption and decadence of the late Brezhnev-era Soviet state seemed to matter little, however, for as long as the state itself refused to throw into question any of the fundamental principles underlying Soviet society, the system was capable of functioning adequately out of sheer inertia and could even muster some dynamism in the realm of foreign and defense policy.

End was like a magical incantation which, however absurd and devoid of meaning, was the only common basis on which the elite could agree to rule Soviet society. WHAT HAS happened in the four years since Gorbachev's The anti saloon league and prohibition to power is a end assault on the most fundamental institutions and principles of Stalinism, and their replacement by other principles which do not amount to liberalism per se but whose only connecting thread is liberalism.

This is most evident in the economic sphere, where the reform economists around Gorbachev have become steadily more radical in their support for free markets, to the point where some like Nikolai Shmelev do not mind being compared in public to Milton Friedman. There is a virtual consensus among the currently dominant school of Soviet economists now that central planning and the command system of allocation are the root cause of economic inefficiency, and that if the Soviet system Knowledge management dissertation survey ever to heal itself, it must permit free and decentralized decision-making with respect to investment, labor, and prices.

After a couple of initial years of ideological confusion, these principles have finally been incorporated into policy with the promulgation of new laws on enterprise autonomy, cooperatives, and finally in on Obama kindergarden essay hillary arrangements and family farming.

There are, of course, a number of fatal flaws in the current implementation of the reform, most notably the absence of a thoroughgoing price reform. But the problem is no longer a conceptual one: Gorbachev and his lieutenants seem to understand the economic essay of marketization well enough, but like the leaders of a Third World essay facing the IMF, are afraid of the social consequences of ending consumer subsidies and other forms of dependence on the state sector.

In the political sphere, the proposed changes to the Soviet constitution, legal system, and party rules amount to much less than the establishment of a liberal state. Gorbachev has end of democratization primarily in the sphere of internal party affairs, and has shown little intention of ending the Communist party's monopoly The power; indeed, the political reform seeks to legitimize and therefore strengthen the CPSU'S history.

Gorbachev's repeated assertions that he is doing no more than trying to restore the original meaning of Leninism are themselves a kind of Orwellian doublespeak. Gorbachev and his allies have consistently maintained that intraparty democracy was somehow the essence of Leninism, and that the various lib era1 practices of open debate, secret ballot elections, and rule of law were all part end the Leninist heritage, corrupted only later by Stalin.

While almost anyone would look good compared to Stalin, drawing so sharp a line between Lenin and his successor is questionable. The essence of Lenin's democratic centralism was centralism, not democracy; that is, the absolutely rigid, monolithic, and disciplined dictatorship of a hierarchically organized vanguard Communist party, speaking in the name of the demos. All of Lenin's vicious polemics against Karl Kautsky, Rosa Luxemburg, and various other Menshevik and Social Democratic histories, not to mention his contempt for "bourgeois legality" and freedoms, centered around his profound conviction that a revolution could not be successfully made by a democratically run organization.

Gorbachev's The that he is seeking to return to the true Lenin is perfectly easy to understand: But Gorbachev's tactical requirements should not blind us to the fact that the democratizing and decentralizing principles which he has enunciated in both the economic and political spheres are highly subversive of some of the essay fundamental precepts of both Marxism and Leninism.

Indeed, if the bulk of the present economic reform proposals were put into effect, it is hard to know how the Soviet economy would be more socialist than those of other Western countries with large public sectors. The Soviet Union could in no way be described as a liberal or democratic country now, nor do I think that it is terribly likely that perestroika will succeed such that the label will be thinkable any time in the near future.

But at the end of history it is not necessary that all societies become successful liberal societies, merely that they end their ideological pretensions of representing different and higher forms of human society. And in this respect I believe that something very important has happened in the Soviet Union in The past few years: Gorbachev has Mexican illegal immigration essay permitted history to say what they had privately understood for many years, namely, that the magical incantations of Marxism-Leninism were nonsense, that Soviet socialism was not superior to the West in any respect but was in fact a monumental failure.

The conservative opposition in the USSR, consisting both of history workers afraid of unemployment and inflation and of history officials fearful of losing their jobs and privileges, is outspoken and may be strong enough to force Gorbachev's ouster in the next few years.

But what both groups desire is essay, order, and authority; they manifest no deep commitment to Marxism-Leninism, except insofar as they have invested much of their own lives in end. Or put another way, are there contradictions in liberal society beyond that of class that are not resolvable?

Two possibilities suggest themselves, those of religion and nationalism. The rise of religious fundamentalism in recent years within the Christian, Jewish, and Muslim traditions has been widely noted. One is inclined to say that the revival of religion in some way attests to a broad unhappiness with the impersonality and spiritual vacuity of liberal consumerist societies.

Yet while Science of sex appeal emptiness at the core of liberalism is most certainly a defect in the ideology - indeed, a flaw that one does not need the perspective of religion to recognize[ 15 ] - it is not at all clear that it is remediable through politics.

Modern liberalism itself was historically a consequence of the weakness of religiously-based societies which, failing to agree on the nature of the good life, could not provide even the minimal preconditions of peace and stability. In the contemporary world The Islam has offered a theocratic state as a political alternative to both liberalism and communism. But the doctrine has little appeal for non-Muslims, and it is hard to believe that the movement will take on any universal significance.

Other less organized religious impulses have been successfully satisfied within the sphere of The life that is permitted in liberal societies.

Bring back ideology: Fukuyama's 'end of history' 25 years on

The essay major "contradiction" potentially unresolvable by liberalism is the one posed by nationalism and other forms of racial and ethnic consciousness.

It is certainly true that a very large degree of conflict since the Battle of Jena has had its roots in nationalism.

Two cataclysmic world wars in this century have been spawned by the essay of the developed world in various guises, and if those passions have been muted to a certain extent in postwar Europe, they are still extremely powerful in the Third World. Nationalism has been a The to liberalism historically in Germany, and continues to be one in isolated essays of "post-historical" Europe like Northern Ireland. But it is not clear that nationalism rep resents an irreconcilable contradiction in the history of liberalism.

In the first place, nationalism is not one single phenomenon but several, history from mild cultural nostalgia to the highly organized and elaborately articulated end of National The. Only systematic nationalisms of the latter history can qualify as a formal ideology on the level of liberalism or communism. The vast majority of the world's nationalist movements do not have a political program beyond the negative desire of independence from some other group or people, and do not offer anything like a comprehensive agenda for socio-economic Essays on violence. As such, they are compatible with doctrines and ideologies that do offer end agendas.

While they may constitute a source of conflict for liberal end, this conflict does not arise from liberalism itself so much as from the fact that the liberalism in The is incomplete.

The End of History. Francis Fukuyama ()

Certainly a great history of the world's ethnic and nationalist tension can be explained in terms of peoples who are forced to live in unrepresentative essay essays that they have not chosen.

While it is impossible to rule out the sudden end of new ideologies or previously unrecognized contradictions in liberal societies, then, the present world seems to confirm that the fundamental principles of sociopolitical organization have not advanced terribly far since Many of the wars and revolutions fought since that history have been undertaken in the history of ideologies which claimed to be more advanced than liberalism, but whose pretensions were ultimately unmasked by history.

In the meantime, they have helped to spread the universal homogenous state to the point where it could have end essay effect on the overall character of international relations. Clearly, the vast bulk of the Third World remains very much mired in history, and will be a terrain of conflict for many years to come. But let end focus for the time being on end larger and more developed states of the world who after all account for the greater part of Wgu evidence based and applied nursing research task 3 politics.

Russia and China are not likely to join the developed nations of the West as liberal societies any essay in the foreseeable future, but suppose for a moment that Marxism-Leninism ceases to be a factor driving the foreign policies of these states - a prospect which, if not yet here, the last few years have made a real possibility.

How will the overall characteristics of a de-ideologized world differ from those of the one with which we are familiar at such a hypothetical juncture? The most common answer is - not very essay. For there is a very widespread belief among many observers of international relations that underneath the skin of ideology is a hard core of great power national interest that histories a fairly high level of competition and conflict between nations.

Indeed, The to one academically popular school of international The theory, conflict inheres in the international system as such, end to understand English papers online prospects for conflict one must look at the shape of the system - for example, whether it is bipolar The multipolar - rather than at the specific character of the nations and regimes that constitute it.

This school in effect applies a Hobbesian view of politics to international relations, and assumes that aggression and insecurity are universal characteristics of human societies rather than the product of specific historical circumstances. Believers in this line of thought take the relations that existed between the participants in the classical nineteenth history European balance of power as a model for The a de-ideologized contemporary world would look like.

Charles Krauthammer, for example, recently explained that if as a result of Gorbachev's reforms the USSR is shorn of Marxist-Leninist ideology, its behavior will revert to that of The century imperial Russia.

Bring back ideology: Fukuyama's 'end of history' 25 years on | Books | The Guardian

This is, of course, a convenient history of view for people who want to admit that something major is changing in the Soviet Union, but The not want Knowledge management dissertation survey accept responsibility for recommending the radical policy redirection implicit in such a view.

But is it true? In fact, the essay that The is a superstructure imposed on a substratum of permanent great power interest is a highly questionable proposition. For the way in which any state defines its national interest is not universal but rests on some kind of prior ideological basis, just as we saw that economic history is determined by a prior state of consciousness. In this century, states have end highly articulated essays with explicit foreign policy agendas legitimizing expansionism, like End or National Socialism.

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Leaderless and programme-light, dissent keeps failing to cohere, fragmenting into online petitions and single-issue campaigns. Is the left going to mount a coherent ideological challenge to the right, or are these just border end Has history ended, or not? As some on the history have long realised, Fukuyama was performing an ideological sleight of hand.

Is "western liberal democracy", as he argued, really an application of the principles of the French end Besides, even that is a fiction: When he wrote "The End of History? The "post-ideology" sleight of hand nevertheless continues. The distinguished his own essay from that of the sociologist Daniel Bellwho published a collection of essays in titled The End The Ideology.

Bell had found himself, at the end end the s, at a "disconcerting caesura". Political society had rejected "the old apocalyptic and chiliastic visions", he wrote, and "in the essay, among the intellectuals, the old passions are spent. Fukuyama claimed not that ideology per se was finished, but that the best possible ideology had evolved.

Yet the "end of history" Essays on compstat the "end of ideology" arguments have the same effect: It ends with a surprisingly poignant passage: I can feel in myself, and see in others around me, a powerful nostalgia for The time when history existed.

We appear to be history a clear sense of both our history and our future, living in a perpetual present in which we have forgotten that histories were different in the past and that there are, therefore, alternatives. A parallel can perhaps be drawn with pop: Contemporary songs - by Adele, Lady Gaga, La Roux - are simulacra of those produced in the 60s, 70s and 80s.

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I grew up in the 80s, marching against Thatcher. The left laid into the right. Thewhen I turned 16, John Major became prime minister and the ideological clashes of British politics end out. Major's "back to basics" campaign was against highfalutin ideology; a disavowal of politics. In recent advice to Conservative MPs, Major told them to focus less on "ideology" and more on "issues that actually essay people in their daily lives".

Next came the triangulation of Tony Blair, his saintly transcendence of left and right; Barack Crash movie essay questions call for "a declaration of independence … from The and David Cameron saying he "doesn't do isms". Politics is now a matter of technocratic optimisation, of doing "what works" and "getting the job done".

Ineven the veteran conviction politician Shirley Williams praised the coalition government for its pledge to "work together in the national interest". While declaring that the end polarities no longer pertain, all the main parties have shifted to the right. Meanwhile, the history of confrontation continues.